Page 58 of Souls of Steel
This slight wouldn’t go unpunished. I’d find out who was hunting us down and I’d make them regret it. This time, I wouldn’t take pity on them. I wouldn’t let them live like I had with Vincent. One by one, they’d all die.
After all, Cerberus needed to feed from time to time and what better moment to do it than now?
The Sun-Dwellers
Selene
The winner of the tournament was a man named Clay Savage, from The Oceanus Attack Corps. He was promoted three ranks and received a terra-formed domain on Earth as a prize.
I wanted to kick someone in the face when I heard. My mother and her priestesses worked themselves to the bone and slaved night and day to heal the damaged earth. Every individual patch of land took ages to return to its previous condition. The Grand Judiciary had just given away a decade’s worth of work.
I didn’t have time to focus on my righteous anger over that. In fact, I didn’t bother staying to witness the end of the tournament at all. Instead, I left Hyperion Base 35 and headed into The Fields of Mercury again. I had a job to do and a promise to keep. We couldn’t abandon Charybdis. If we had even the slightest chance to find her, we owed it to both her and August to try.
Brendan was the Chimera prince and couldn’t just leave. Pollux had to keep an eye on August. Knox and I still had our chimeras in perfect working order, so it was up to us.
Knox seemed to think finding her was impossible, but he followed me anyway. He was the one who’d last seen Charybdis. Apparently, he’d torn off her cockpit to extract August, at which point he’d been forced to leave the dormant chimera. I didn’t blame him, even if he blamed himself.
“If we don’t find her, another model can be built,” I tried to reassure him.
“I know, but that takes a long time. Chimeras aren’t exactly regular mechas. And even if the shell itself is created, there’s no guarantee the soul will come to inhabit it anytime soon. For all we know, the machine will remain dormant instead of turning to August again.”
“Has that happened before?” I asked with a frown.
“A few times, yes, although never like this. Chimeras don’t fall apart in the middle of a battle. It’s not in their nature. This is just too strange.”
Someone had sabotaged the Charybdis. But who and why? Had they been trying to get to me and August had just been in the way? If so, why had the Sphinx remained untouched even when the Typhon and Scylla had started acting weirdly?
I didn’t understand anything anymore, but I did know this. August had said Charybdis was alone. That meant she had to still be alive.
“What do you think, Sphinx?” I asked my friend. “You’re the expert here. Where should we go?”
“There’s no point in heading closer to the Sun. I can’t feel her anywhere, but if she did wander into that area, she’s lost to us anyway. Let’s try Mercury.”
Knox and I split up in an attempt to cover as much ground as possible. The planet wasn’t very large, not anymore, but it would still take us at least a day to properly map.
In space, everything was silent, and Mercury was no different. Once Knox and I went our separate ways, the silence seemed to gain physical substance, battering the Sphinx. I held onto my controls as tightly as I could and divided my attention between the displays and my additional skill.
It was a little easier when in direct connection with Sphinx, but still strenuous after two days’ worth of fighting. It also brought me next to no results.
One would think that a gigantic, snake-like mecha would be easy to find, but that wasn’t the case at all. The surface of the planet was still uneven and remnants of old ships had been left behind. Space rock constantly struck the ground, so the geography changed. If Charybdis had fallen somewhere here, she could have been buried underground and we’d never see her.
Hours passed, with no progress. My head hurt and Sphinx’s concern started to vibrate through me.“We should stop, Selene. You need to take a break. At this rate, you’ll give yourself brain damage and we won’t get anywhere.”
“I can go a little further,” I insisted. “We’re close. I can feel it.”
“All right, but if you push yourself too far, I’m putting my paw down. Understand?”
“Yes, yes. Don’t worry. I’ll stop if I absolutely have to.”
I hoped it wouldn’t come down to that, because in a situation like this, every second counted. Charybdis might not be my chimera, but she was, in her own way, my friend. If we couldn’t save her, if we couldn’t do this one, simple thing, how was I supposed to change the way people saw women as a whole?
My stubbornness paid off, and only a few minutes after my exchange with Sphinx, I caught a glimpse of crimson down below. My heart started beating faster. I guided my chimera lower down and started to remove the space rock in my way.
It didn’t take me long to realize I’d found my target. It was her. It was Charybdis. She was inactive, but still mostly in one piece. “Can she be fixed?”
“I don’t know,”Sphinx replied,“but we have a better chance, now that we’ve found her.”
The Charybdis was too massive for me to carry back to the base, so I contacted Knox to get his help. Cerberus showed up a little while later, visibly excited. I was pretty sure he was wagging his tail. Not for the first time, I wondered to what point the chimeras felt things like they had in their old, flesh-and-blood bodies. One of these days, I had to ask Sphinx about it.
